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Savage Detectives

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New Year''s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.

The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

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Savage Detectives

The following ISBNs are associated with this title:

ISBN - 10: 0374191484

ISBN - 13: 9780374191481

About the Book

Bolano traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. "The Savage Detectives" is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the 21st century.

Read from the Book

NOVEMBER 2 I''ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. NOVEMBER 3 I''m not really sure what visceral realism is. I''m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I''m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I''m an orphan, and someday I''ll be a lawyer. That''s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time. Then, as if it were settled, I started class in the law school''s hallowed halls, but a month later I registered for Julio César Álamo''s poetry workshop in the literature department, and that was how I met the visceral realists, or viscerealists or even vicerealists, as they sometimes like to call themselves. Up until then, I had attended the workshop four times and nothing ever happened, though only in a manner of speaking, of course, since naturally something always happened: we read poems, and Álamo praised them or tore them to pieces, depending on his mood; one person would read, Álamo would critique, another person would read, Álamo would critique, somebody else would read, Álamo would critique. Sometimes Álamo would get bored and ask us (those of us who weren''t reading just then) to critique too, and then we would critique and Álamo would read the paper. It was the ideal method for e

From the Publisher

New Year''s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.

The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

About the Author

Born in Chile in 1953,&nbsp;Roberto Bolaño&nbsp;fled to Mexico after the military government took power in the late 1960s. There he helped found the infrarealist movement. He later settled with his wife and children in northern Spain, where he died in 2003. He received all of that country''s highest literary awards, including the Romulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. In 2004 he was honored by the First Conference of Latin American Authors as "the most important literary discovery of our time."

Editorial Reviews

International Praise for Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives: "One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening." --John Banville, The Nation "The brightest hope for the future of South American literature." --Andreas Breitenstein, Neuen Zürcher Zeitung "An event. The Savage Detectives [is] a brutal and lyrical vision of the last thirty years of the millennium." --Fabienne Dumontet, Le Monde des Livres "A rare and fertile talent." --Amaia Gabantxo, The Times Literary Supplement "Certain books go by too quickly. We wish they''d last longer and count the pages, not out of boredom, but out of anxiety at having to tell the characters goodbye. The Savage Detectives is one of these books.In the twists and turns of its mock-scholarly construction, The Savage Detectives succeeds in capturing both the fever of the past and the terrible, impossible yearning to have it back." --Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles "Bolaño, it seemed to me, hovers over many young Latin American writers, even those in their 40s, the way Garciá Márquez must have over his generation and the following one." --Francisco Goldman, The New York Times "Powerful and disorienting . . . [Bolaño''s] books are bursting with humour that is both raw and sophisticated." --Angel Gurria-Quintana, The Financial Times "Bolaño is a prodigious storyteller on the level of Thomas Pynchon and